Courses

Spring 2018

UndergraduateMAMFA

50:350:105:01 Lab: Research and Writing
T 3:35-4:45
Mahony

A one-credit skills lab attached to “Introduction to English Studies,” where students will meet to improve their writing and research skills in a guided setting. This support is not required, but enrolling should make it much more likely you will succeed in the course, as well as in your university career.

50:350:201:01 Introduction to English Studies
TTh 2:00-3:20
Blackford

This course introduces you to a range of fields and professions in English Studies, focusing on analytical methods in each. We will look at the motif of Uncle Tom and what Linda Williams calls “racial melodrama” across literary texts, stage, film, illustration, material culture, and television. Henry James called Uncle Tom’s Cabin a “leaping fish” that would not stay in the text; we will follow this leaping fish from Harriet Beecher Stowe to minstrel shows to Shirley Temple’s Dimples to The Green Mile. Williams even claims the televised trials of OJ Simpson followed the pattern. Let’s see if we agree. Projects will include several short papers and the production of a website to showcase multimodal projects and professional goals. Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Required for English majors

From cave drawings to computer-generated avatars, visual storytelling has always been central to how we know ourselves. We’ll study nine graphic novels and memoirs as way into thinking about the central issues of our time. Through careful study and joyful appreciation of the work in front of us, we’ll consider the matters of identity, interaction, and intertextuality as a way to become more attuned to others and to the culture in which we live. Fulfills the AAI General Education category.

50:350:238:01 World Literature I
TTh 9:35-10:55
Fiske

This course will introduce students to masterpieces of the Western literary tradition from 1000 BC to 1700 AD and will include ancient Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance works. Primary texts include selections from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteian Trilogy, Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. We will explore these works in their own cultural and historical contexts as well as examine their relevance to the modern world. Fulfills the HAC General Education category.

Electronic Literature and Performance is a workshop-based course that meets the Digital Studies elective criteria for developing knowledge and skills in new media and multimedia composition. In this course students will explore the intersection between digital literature and digital performance. Some questions we will consider over the course of the semester are: in what ways is digital literature performative? How can digital texts serve as scripts for IRL and URL performances? In an era where we are frequently online, what new venues and possibilities for performance have opened up in digital spaces? How are writers and performers using these spaces in creative ways, to reach an audience without having to go through gatekeepers? Considering the strong lineage of body-based performance art, what happens to the body (or our digital avatar’s bodies) in the “immaterial” digital realm? What happens to language? When the body of the text and the body of the performer merge digitally, what radical (politically and aesthetically) works emerge? Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:350:251:01 Ten Books I Should Have Read
TTh 11:10-12:30
Barbarese

Why always the same books or films or graphic novels? What do we mean by classic, universal, or standard text? Ten Books looks at ten books that always appear on syllabi and asks how they got there— from the inevitable (Hamlet, The Great Gatsby) to the controversial (Harry Potter, Watchman)—and includes films, both original (Chinatown, Heathers) and adaptations. Good for future educators. Quizzes, a midterm and final, and a short essay. Fulfills the HAC General Education category.

50:350:261:40 Texts and Film: Shakespeare
TTh 6:00-7-20
Fitter

Anybody who has watched even one of the BBC Shakespeare series will, temporarily, have lost the will to live. Even the film versions more routinely screened favour ‘authenticity’: men in ruffs waving rapiers, spouting high-minded obscurities. But a few — very few– ‘Shakespeare’ movies have rejected wooden pieties for astonishing transformations of the old into the hilarious, weird or postmodern new, and these cinematic masterpieces we shall watch. Five remarkable Shakespeare films, plus O: a street-smart adaptation of Othello to modern American youth-culture. Surprise yourself by enjoying Shakespeare. Some tests plus a short paper. Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Beginning and ending with the latest reports on climate change, we shall examine literary presentations of Nature from the ancient world to the modern (Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney). But we will also at every point discuss the ways historical cultures have worked against Nature, to fell, deplete or burn the wilds. The reading set every week will usually be light, so you will be asked also to read and submit notes on Ronald Wright’s witty and brilliant little book, A Short History of Progress. Requirements will include two exams and a short paper. Fulfills the HAC General Education category.

50:842:238:01 Visual Rhetoric and Culture
TTh 9:35-10:55
FitzGerald

The ability to “read” images and to understand, critique and even create visual arguments is ever more important. This course recognizes how crucial visual literacy is for participating in contemporary culture— as consumers, contributors, and citizens. Images persuade, we know, but how? Grounded in key concepts of rhetoric and representation, we will analyze visuals of many types (photographs, maps, comics, fonts, page layouts, social media posts, infographics). We will gain a robust vocabulary for analyzing visual elements and effects in (mostly 2-D, static) images that act as arguments. Course work involves a weekly journal of entries analyzing visual rhetoric, including two longer pieces (@ 2 pages), five DIY exercises (photoediting, drawing, designing information, captioning) and a final paper (8-10 pages) on a topic of choice. Fulfills the USW General Education category. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:350:329:01 Old English Language and Literature
MW 9:35-10:55
Hostetter

The English language has been around for a very long time, and it has gone through many changes. More than one thousand years ago, you might not recognize it if you heard someone speaking it, though the kinship can be seen when you see it written. This course will train you to go back in time linguistically, to be able to read the extant documents of the earliest users of English, both in nice, safe edited texts AND in the manuscripts where this language is found in the wild. Coursework includes translations, some quizzes, a midterm, a final, and a final project of some sort (doesn’t have to be a paper). Fulfills the HAC General Education category. Satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

A survey from the 18th century to the present, with emphasis on the major periods, typical plays, performance theories, important figures, and major playhouses and forms of production. Western and nonWestern traditions may be examined. Fulfills the HAC General Education category. Fulfills the GCM General Education category.

50:350:360:90 Literature of Childhood
TTh Online
Vial

Books read by children and teens shape their readers’ lives and perceptions, whether they present enchanted gardens and princes charming or the very real pain of orphans and adolescents. This course will examine a variety of “classic,” realist, fantasy, and picture books in order to think critically about the worlds they present. Students will learn to analyze and evaluate texts based on notions of childhood, representations of class, gender and ethnicity, and the role of the marketplace. AAI/ WRI *

50:350:388:01 Women in Literature
TTh 11:10-12:30
Fiske

This course will examine key texts by British and American women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout our readings, we will focus on how women’s individual, social, and economic possibilities are shaped by the intersecting boundaries of lived history and literary production. Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Fulfills the DIV General Education category.

An introduction to the rich variety of Irish literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the historical circumstances out of which it grew. The course begins in Camden, with readings in the fiction, drama, and poetry of the period, and concludes in Ireland, with explorations of its fascinating historical context. We will study works by key figures in the Irish Literary Renaissance of the early 20th century, as well as important writers of the present. The tour will be divided between the East and the West of Ireland: between cosmopolitan Dublin, with its theatres and museums, and romantic Galway, including an overnight visit to Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. Two days in the old Viking settlement of Sligo (“Yeats Country”) will offer a sense of life in the Irish provincial towns. The course meets on a reduced class schedule: 18 meetings on TTh afternoons. Fulfills the GCM General Education category. Fulfills the XPL General Education category.

This Learning Abroad course will explore the history and modern life of Australia and give Rutgers students the chance to research and report on these subjects first hand while traveling in Australia midsemester. During alternating weekly classes we will discuss the history, culture and media landscape of Australia, and issues pertaining to the role and function of journalism there. These in-class discussions will be reinforced by a 12-day trip during Spring Break to Australia, where we will travel from Sydney to Melbourne to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, experiencing the people, animals and natural world in of this vast and varied country. Students will maintain a culture immersion blog prior to our trip, an experiential journal during our travels, and write a magazine-type feature article by the end of the semester based on their research and in-country reporting. Fulfills the GCM General Education category. Fulfills the XPL General Education category.

50:350:400:01 Portfolio Pro Seminar
T 3:45-4:45
Dubose

Books read by children and teens shape their readers’ lives and perceptions, whether they present enchanted gardens and princes charming or the very real pain of orphans and adolescents. This course will examine a variety of “classic,” realist, fantasy, and picture books in order to think critically about the worlds they present. Students will learn to analyze and evaluate texts based on notions of childhood, representations of class, gender and ethnicity, and the role of the marketplace. Fulfills the GCM General Education category.

In this course, we will read and examine African-American fiction, poetry, memoir, and drama, published from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Along with considering the content of the literary works, we will examine the cultural, historical, and political contexts of the literature. Through the course lectures, required readings, and class discussions, students will attain a fuller understanding of the literature as well as improve their critical reading and writing skills. Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Fulfills the DIV General Education category.

50:352:393:01 Special Topics: Twentieth Century American Novel
TTh 2:00-3:20
Barbarese

Beginning with James and running through Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Mailer, O’Connor, Capote, Pynchon, Barthelme, Roth, Morrison, Cheever, DeLillo and McCarthy, the course follows the central paths of American fiction, with special emphasis on the novel as history. Each novel will be compared to an adaptation (film, graphic novel), successful or unsuccessful. Midterm and final and a short essay. Fulfills the AAI General Education category.

50:354:301:40 History of Film II
MW 6:00-7:20
Mokhberi

With various channel services and web resources available today, movie fans indulge in their passion more than ever. And yet most of cinema’s artistry goes unnoticed. This course will introduce students to the aspects and practice of film analysis. We will learn about the techniques that make cinema an art, including composition, camera work, editing, acting style, narrative construction, and others. Through class readings, discussion, and viewing in class/at home, the class will learn to actively “read” (instead of passively watch) a film for its formal artistry. Students will also gain an understanding of movements in film history and how they developed cinema into the art it is today. Fulfills the AAI General Education category and counts toward the interdisciplinary film minor.

50:354:396:90 Film Genre: Horror
Online
Sorrento

This course will cover the history of horror, a dynamic though misunderstood tradition in cinema. After beginning with the horror film’s first appearances in American and German silent film, this survey will trace the genre’s development in the early Hollywood studio system up through contemporary treatments. We will analyze how cinematic/cultural movements and historical eras have informed horror movies, and how landmark films – including Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hitchcock’s Psycho, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, among others – have revised the genre. This survey will also consider the artistry of trademark directors, screenwriters, and performers through viewing and close analysis. Counts toward the interdisciplinary film minor. Fulfills the AAI General Education category.

In an era when the label of “fake news” is being applied to much of what’s being produced by mainstream news outlets and across social media networks, sorting out truth from fiction and understanding how the media works is of critical importance. Building on students’ tech savvy skills and natural affinity for buzzworthy topics, this Media Literacy course will explore how members of the media do their jobs, how politicians, corporations, and other influencers attempt to manipulate, exploit, or in some cases bypass, the media, and how the public comprehends what is delivered. In the end, students will have acquired the insights and tools needed to become responsible media consumers and creators. The seminar-style course will include guest speakers, a hands-on digital tools workshop and other participatory activities. There will be a midterm, a final and a research paper. Fulfills the USW General Education category.

50:570:306:01 Urban Reporting
MW 12:30-1:50
Capuzzo

Using Camden as our reporting canvas, this journalism course will try to unravel the labyrinth of city life while providing students with the skills needed to report in the urban environment around them. Through lectures and field trips, we will explore several aspects of the City’s past and present, including: city government and politics, immigration, housing and community development, criminal justice, education and healthcare. We will visit and report from various sites and neighborhoods in the city, developing sources to produce both shorter and longer articles that shed light on issues facing the city and its people. USW *

50:615:336:01 Modern American Grammar
MW 6:00-7:20
Epstein

This course will serve as an overview to the scientific study of language, introducing students to the basic concepts and methods of linguistic analysis. Students will acquire the analytic skills and problem-solving techniques commonly used in the core areas of Linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. We will also examine the areas of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and language typology, as well as questions relating to language and culture.

Course requirements: In addition to a midterm and a final exam, students will be expected to complete a number of problem sets, drawn from a wide range of the world’s languages, and also, to keep a “diary” about the grammatical characteristics of an “exotic” language. Fulfills the PLS General Education category.

50:615:225:01 Language, Class and Culture
MW 3:45-5:05
Epstein

This course is an introduction to Sociolinguistics, the area of Linguistics that studies the way social factors (age, gender, socio-economic class, ethnic group, occupation, etc.) and regional differences give rise to variation in language (that is, “dialects”). Topics to be covered include: language and social identity, language and social context (formal and informal speech styles), dialect differences (standard vs. nonstandard dialects), men’s vs. women’s speech, bilingualism, language attitudes (the notion of “authority” in language), the relation between language, cognition and culture, pidgin and creole languages, etc. Course requirements: Midterm, final exam and field research project/paper. Fulfills the DIV General Education category. Fulfills the EAV General Education category

50:842:238:01 Visual Rhetoric and Culture
TTh 9:35-10:55
FitzGerald

The ability to “read” images and to understand, critique and even create visual arguments is ever more important. This course recognizes how crucial visual literacy is for participating in contemporary culture— as consumers, contributors, and citizens. Images persuade, we know, but how? Grounded in key concepts of rhetoric and representation, we will analyze visuals of many types (photographs, maps, comics, fonts, page layouts, social media posts, infographics). We will gain a robust vocabulary for analyzing visual elements and effects in (mostly 2-D, static) images that act as arguments. Course work involves a weekly journal of entries analyzing visual rhetoric, including two longer pieces (@ 2 pages), five DIY exercises (photoediting, drawing, designing information, captioning) and a final paper (8-10 pages) on a topic of choice. Fulfills the USW General Education category. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:989:300:90 Writing Public Arguments
Online
Staff

The fundamental techniques of argument, demonstration, and persuasion; analysis of sample readings and extensive writing practice. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:989:301:01 Art of Revision
S 11:30-2:20
Staff

Practice in the art of constructing clear, concise prose, with emphasis on developing a personal style. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

In Introduction to Creative Writing, we will explore a variety of genres and approaches towards writing creatively: essay, poetry, screenwriting, and fiction. By studying these genres and the spaces in between, we will work to identify the stories you most want to tell, and how we can craft our language on the page to communicate deeper meanings. Fulfills the AAI General Education category. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:989:309:01 Nonfiction Writing Workshop
MW 2:05-3:25
Demaree

Creative nonfiction encompasses a wide variety of genres, such as the personal essay, memoir, criticism, travel and nature writing. This workshop will allow you to submit three samples of your own nonfiction writing throughout the semester to be read and discussed by your peers. From these discussions, we will focus on improving our skills in crafting voice, purpose, and structure. Alongside this we will conduct a survey of the contemporary essay, reading the works of such writers as Jesmyn Ward, David Sedaris, Cheryl Strayed, and David Foster Wallace. Fulfills the AAI General Education category.

50:989:313:40 Writing for Non-Profit
Th 6:00-8:50
Falk

This course will introduce students to the many types of writing required for success in the non-profit world, from the fundamentals of writing a funding proposal to building a communication strategy that effectively transmits an organization’s mission to the public. Along the way, the genres of writing students learn will convey a sense of how the different entities within a nonprofit – programming, fundraising, and communications, at the bare minimum – work together. This course is designated as a civic engagement course, which means that students will be required to partner with non-profit organizations in the city of Camden, and that final projects will also help fulfill a need expressed by one of those organizations. This component of the course will require visits to organization sites and conversations with staff outside of class and off campus. Fulfills the ECL General Education category. Fulfills the WRI General Education category.

50:989:316:01 Digital Publishing
MW 2:05-325
DuBose

This course will introduce students to the process of producing publications for the web. Students will begin the semester by reviewing essays and fiction submitted by their Rutgers-Camden peers and select a number of them to publish in The Scarlet Review, the campus’s annual online magazine. Students will work in teams to edit, copyedit and design the magazine and prepare articles for publication at the end of the semester. Principles of editorial stance, typographic design and basic web design will also be discussed. Fulfills the AAI General Education category and the XPL General Education category.

50:989:319:01 Introduction to Web Design
MW 10:20-11:15
DuBose

This course will introduce students to the basic principles of web design. Beginning with HTML markup, students will learn best practices in creating sites that are accessible to all users on all devices. Much of the semester will focus on the use of CSS to create page layouts and style content. The course will also cover site prototyping and strategies for organizing large amounts of web content. Fulfills the AAI General Education category.

This course is slated for Gen Ed approval, which should come well before the start of the semester. Please see Registrar’s website in a couple of weeks to double-check final status.

An introduction to the rich variety of Irish literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the historical circumstances out of which it grew. The course begins in Camden, with readings in the fiction, drama, and poetry of the period, and concludes in Ireland, with explorations of its fascinating and complex historical context. We will study works by key figures in the Irish Literary Renaissance of the early 20th century, as well as important writers of the present. Attention, inevitably, will fall on the traditional preoccupations of Irish literature: the strength of national or patriotic feeling, the place of the Church in Irish culture, the strength and pungency of Irish family life, and the special quality of the English language in Ireland. The tour, planned for May 25-June 3, 2018, will be divided between the East and the West of Ireland: between cosmopolitan Dublin, with its theatres and museums, and romantic Galway, including an overnight visit to Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. Two days in the ancient Viking settlement of Sligo will give students a sense of life in the Irish provincial towns. Consistent with the guidelines of the campus Learning Abroad program, the course meets on a reduced class schedule: nine weeks of classes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

This Learning Abroad course will explore the history and modern life of Australia and give Rutgers students the chance to research and report on these subjects first hand while traveling in Australia midsemester. During alternating weekly classes we will discuss the history, culture and media landscape of Australia, and issues pertaining to the role and function of journalism there. These in-class discussions will be reinforced by a 12-day trip during Spring Break to Australia, where we will travel from Sydney to Melbourne to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, experiencing the people, animals and natural world in of this vast and varied country. Students will maintain a culture immersion blog prior to our trip, an experiential journal during our travels, and write a magazine-type feature article by the end of the semester based on their research and in-country reporting.

Editors are the “hidden figures” of the publishing industry. Learn more about what they do in this course, which trains you in scholarly editing in particular and in theories and practices of editing texts in print and online generally. We also explore developments in the digital humanities and recent technologies such as Scalar, a digital publishing platform. Put theories into practice with hands-on editing of archival texts, including those in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton project (Oxford University Press), for which Dr. Singley is the General Editor; explore other modern editions; and edit a text of your choosing. Assignments include readings, one or two oral presentations, and at least two hands-on editing projects.

56:615:560 Special Topics: Modern and Contemporary Poetry Cross-listed with 56:606:612:01
M 6:00-8:50
Hoffman

In this course we will read widely in English language poetry of the modern and contemporary periods, from all over the world, stopping to pause over a few long poems (and poetic sequences) and a few poets whose body of work we will get to know intimately. Focusing on the schools that develop during the course of the last century or so—and the polemical debates that rage between and among members of competing schools—we will take in the work of the high modernists and other experimental poetries of the modernist period that condition the postmodern moment, as well as a persistent formalist tradition. Our primary attention will be to the intellectual and historical contexts that shape the emergence of different kinds of poetry and to issues of technique and craft. Responsibilities include group presentations, an original piece of scholarship, and a final exam.

This seminar will introduce you to Victorian and twentieth-century theories of and concerns with child/adolescent sexuality, from case studies to crusades to literature to digital representations. We will weed through Freud’s cases such as Dora and Little Hans, see how Victorians went nuts about masturbation, look at some of the stranger cases of Havelock Ellis, see how works like Where the Wild Things Are used the wolf-man, see how Radclyffe Hall used a transgender childhood case, look at how abuse shaped writers like Dorothy Allison and Maya Angelou, interpret children’s literature as presenting sexual tensions, and read a variety of works in which youth sexuality is situated in terms of race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and more diffuse symbolism like food, objects, and magic wands or chambers of secrets. Requirements include a presentation (including leading of discussion), two take-home close-reading exams, and a research project that may take the form of a traditional research paper or an electronic/multimodal/professional project.

56:350:595:01 Special Topics: Gothic Literature
M 6:00-8:50
Ledoux

This course will begin by examining three important novels, which helped to establish the gothic as a highly popular mode in the late eighteenth century: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). We will then look at how these novels influenced the theater during the Romantic period. Works such as Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort, and Charles Maturin’s Bertram used the architecture and landscapes of the novel to foreground and examine a character type later termed as the “Byronic hero.” During the semester we will also encounter Romantic ballads that draw from gothic tropes: S.T. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes.” As we move throughout these genres, we will investigate what aspects of gothic writing are critical to describing it as a cohesive category and how these aspects evolve across time.

In this course we will read various texts that we might call “lyric”—both prose and poetry, as well as some texts for which the distinction is not easily made. We’ll also experiment by writing in the lyric mode. All of our readings, writing, and discussion will bring us closer to an understanding of the history of the lyric from antiquity and some of its expressions in contemporary writing.

56:200:518:01 Fiction Workshop
M 2:00-4:50
Lisicky

The ideal fiction workshop is a place where a variety of approaches are encouraged and respected, where we attempt to create a version of a model literary community: a thriving ecosystem rather than a monoculture. It asks for an openness at every turn, a dedicated generosity, and a willingness to consider each piece on its own terms. We’ll talk about a story from one of three recently published collections at every class meeting, but your fiction will be our primary text. Along the way we’ll work hard, have fun, and make sure both delight and seriousness infuse everything we do.

This is a hybrid class that talks about ways of handling autobiographical material. What are the differences in voice, and approach to plot, in fiction and memoir? When are embellishments, and half-truths, preferable or permissible? We’ll do some reading of writers who have used the same material in both forms, including Kathryn Harrison and Gary Shteyngart, as well as workshop your own writing. Note: this course can count as either workshop or craft class for MFA requirements.

Thesis: Before registering for the thesis class, the MFA student must seek out and request an MFA professor to advise his or her thesis. The student must then register for the thesis class under the name of his or her adviser.